Thinking like a rainforest

How about running your business like a rainforest?

A blog post from Henrietta Housley (Horizons 2023 and now a CATALYST mentor) and Dr Beth Mackintosh (Lead Educator at CATALYST).

During the CATALYST by Winchester College Horizons course, we explored many remarkable themes within AI, Science, Philosophy and Economics, and also how to think. In Lens 2, the Philosophy module, Beth introduced us to thinkers such as bell hooks, and the idea that thinking resists dominant power structures (the oppositional gaze); Mary Midgley, and espousing a many maps, many windows, mixed perspectives view of reality; and also the work of Eduardo Kohn and his book How Forests Think, in order to learn new thinking tools from the living world. I plan to study Finance and Business for my undergraduate studies, and CATALYST has equipped me with the thinking tools to engage with problems from multiple perspectives. I am interested in what a business can learn from nature, in terms of a modelling, meeting demand, and stewardship.

Honeycombs are an example of structure that encloses maximum amount of space within the minimum amount of walling material.

Biomimicry is the study and emulation of nature for the purposes of business and was coined by Janine Benyon. The idea is that we study nature’s model, its ingenious solutions, and its problem-solving ability e.g. a solar cell inspired by photosynthesis. It offers a model that is based on learning from, as opposed to, extracting from nature a huge shift in current thinking. In terms of a business model this means the product you offer is based on ideas from nature, and not simply using nature as a resource. When considering about a value chain, these should be based on natural systems and hard inflicted on these natural systems is a break from the ecological judgement aforementioned. Your business operates on a model of sustaining people and nature as home and fosters this radical shift.

There are an array of discipline areas espousing to ‘think like a rainforest’ and draw on this wisdom as a metaphor and model for good practice. In Education we have Tom Sherrington @teacherhead: The Learning Rainforest: A model for great teaching and learning. – teacherhead and Victor W. Hwang in business management: https://business-ecosystem-alliance.org/

But what could a business do in practice?

Some of the following criteria has been outlined as ways a business can follow rainforest thinking.

We cannot afford to poison ourselves.

1.      Don’t foul your nest

Organisms must respire, gain nutrition, excrete and respond to stimuli in their habitat. They must strike a balance in these life processes - they cannot risk poisoning themselves. See this for yourself by watching a livestream of soon-to-fledge storks at Knepp, in Sussex, England. Nesting birds instinctively deposit guano over the side of the nest, or produce faeces in faecal sacs, allowing parents to more easily deposit waste away from the nest. Has our species lost sight of this balance, as we pollute and toxify our natural environment? What will in take for us to prioritise the health of our habitats?

2.      Waste not, want not

Use waste as a resource and find ways to create recycling loops to keep from collapse and don’t draw down resources. In nature, nitrogen is cycled between the atmosphere and living organisms by nitrogen-fixing bacteria, nitrifying bacteria, and denitrifying bacteria. Plants use nitrates to make amino acids – the building blocks of proteins. When organisms die microbes break down organism protein, returning nitrogen-containing compounds back into the cycle.  

There are interesting questions to consider here:

How does nature meet demand for reactants / resource, or is it really that supply, when limited, will inevitably result in lower demand as populations and food webs adjust accordingly? Can man-made systems replicate these zero-waste cycles, and benefit? Do industries like fishing really understand that nature’s way of increasing supply is to manage demand? How will future generations meet demand if finite resources are put into non-cyclical, man-made systems?

3.      Symbiotic relationships

Ecosystems are a product of all the biotic and abiotic factors in the habitat. Every living organism depends on other living organisms, in a complex web of interactions. Some species depend directly on each other in their ecological niches – lavender and the bee, or ants fighting off predators of aphids and being rewarded with honeydew. We should build longstanding and durable relationships that model this mutualism, and understand that we really are all in this together. Could we take and build what we need, and refrain from excess that ruins these mutualistic relationships? The rainforest relies upon these cooperative relationships, both with living things, and non-living things such as water, light, and nutrients.

4.      Learning and listening

Nature has a way of adapting and protecting itself as a result of the combination of natural variation, selective pressure, and time. Some insect species have evolved warning signals that dissuade would-be predators, such as bright colours and vivid patterns. Other species use morphology to attract other species, such as the bee orchid. One organism’s evolution can and will affect others’.  There is no central conduction of the orchestra – instead every species forms a part of this complex web of information and interaction – a bottom-up approach - that builds the sustainable whole.

Businesses, like nature, display variation, are vulnerable to selective pressures, and must adapt accordingly over time. Is a top-down approach to change likely to produce a full and effective understanding, or is change best delivered through effective community-driven listening and responding?

What else could we add?

Of course, none of this necessarily new or complicated, but the thing about listening to nature and indeed listening generally in the human sense, is that we aren’t particularly good at it – especially when it requires us to wake-up from the established habits and norms we may find ourselves operating within. As hooks and Midgley would argue: we have the tools to flourish in our communities, but sadly we find listening very difficult as what we hear feels difficult, impossible even and threatening to the current power structure, but of course that doesn’t make what we hear any less important or correct.

I am currently reading Yvon Chouinard’s  Let My People Go Surfing and I am keen to think about case study business that claim as Patagonia does, ‘to use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.’